Previously, you learned about some of the basics, like how many NLP problems are just regular machine learning and data science problems in disguise, and simple, practical methods like bag-of-words and term-document matrices.
These allowed us to do some pretty cool things, like detect spam emails, write poetry, spin articles, and group together similar words.
In this course I’m going to show you how to do even more awesome things. We’ll learn not just 1, but 4 new architectures in this course.

First up is word2vec.
In this course, I’m going to show you exactly how word2vec works, from theory to implementation, and you’ll see that it’s merely the application of skills you already know.
Word2vec is interesting because it magically maps words to a vector space where you can find analogies, like:

king – man = queen – woman

France – Paris = England – London

December – Novemeber = July – June

We are also going to look at the GloVe method, which also finds word vectors, but uses a technique calledmatrix factorization, which is a popular algorithm for recommender systems.
Amazingly, the word vectors produced by GLoVe are just as good as the ones produced by word2vec, and it’s way easier to train.
We will also look at some classical NLP problems, like parts-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition, and use recurrent neural networks to solve them. You’ll see that just about any problem can be solved using neural networks, but you’ll also learn the dangers of having too much complexity.
Lastly, you’ll learn about recursive neural networks, which finally help us solve the problem of negation in sentiment analysis. Recursive neural networks exploit the fact that sentences have a tree structure, and we can finally get away from naively using bag-of-words.
All of the materials required for this course can be downloaded and installed for FREE. We will do most of our work in Numpy,Matplotlib, and Theano. I am always available to answer your questions and help you along your data science journey.

This course focuses on “how to build and understand“, not just “how to use”. Anyone can learn to use an API in 15 minutes after reading some documentation. It’s not about “remembering facts”, it’s about “seeing for yourself” via experimentation. It will teach you how to visualize what’s happening in the model internally. If you want more than just a superficial look at machine learning models, this course is for you.

TIPS (for getting through the course):

Watch it at 2x.

Take handwritten notes. This will drastically increase your ability to retain the information.

Write down the equations. If you don’t, I guarantee it will just look like gibberish.

Ask lots of questions on the discussion board. The more the better!

Realize that most exercises will take you days or weeks to complete.

Write code yourself, don’t just sit there and look at my code.

Suggested Prerequisites:

calculus (taking derivatives)

matrix addition, multiplication

probability (conditional and joint distributions)

Python coding: if/else, loops, lists, dicts, sets

Numpy coding: matrix and vector operations, loading a CSV file

neural networks and backpropagation, be able to derive and code gradient descent algorithms on your own

Today, I spend most of my time as an artificial intelligence and machine learning engineer with a focus on deep learning, although I have also been known as a data scientist, big data engineer, and full stack software engineer.

I received my masters degree in computer engineering with a specialization in machine learning and pattern recognition.

Experience includes online advertising and digital media as both a data scientist (optimizing click and conversion rates) and big data engineer (building data processing pipelines). Some big data technologies I frequently use are Hadoop, Pig, Hive, MapReduce, and Spark.

I`ve created deep learning models to predict click-through rate and user behavior, as well as for image and signal processing and modeling text.

My work in recommendation systems has applied Reinforcement Learning and Collaborative Filtering, and we validated the results using A/B testing.

I have taught undergraduate and graduate students in data science, statistics, machine learning, algorithms, calculus, computer graphics, and physics for students attending universities such as Columbia University, NYU, Hunter College, and The New School.

Multiple businesses have benefitted from my web programming expertise. I do all the backend (server), frontend (HTML/JS/CSS), and operations/deployment work. Some of the technologies I`ve used are: Python, Ruby/Rails, PHP, Bootstrap, jQuery (Javascript), Backbone, and Angular. For storage/databases I`ve used MySQL, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, and more.